OtherThanThat

Sitting this morning after the day’s offering from the current Deepak Chopra and Oprah Winfrey 21-Day Meditation Challenge (which is focused on manifesting and sustaining success), I found myself musing on finding congruity between inner and outer life experience. The day’s message being that in order to truly achieve success there must be a mesh between those inner and outer spaces.

Considering that a decent portion of my life has been one saturated with a decent level of incongruity, this is a good point of challenge.

I’m not a unique snowflake when it comes to traveling through life on a slightly mismatched path. For me it came from a baseline fact that who I was in the world and what I chose to do, while things I did well and for which I had skills, weren’t truly aligned with the things that give me joy. Going a bit deeper, that’s because on some level I was presenting myself in the manner I thought that I needed to. Again, not really a unique snowflake here. In my experience, there are more people than not who walk through the world wearing a mask. In some cases we shield our innermost selves due to tragedy, trauma, pain and insecurity. Even those blessed enough to have avoided (or properly processed) such things don’t tend to reveal their full and complete selves at all times. We have versions of ourselves we display in various situations or places.

Who we are with family may be different from who we are with friends, co-workers, neighbors and acquaintances. In an ideal world these selves are concentric rings, Russian nesting dolls, each of which goes deeper and deeper towards our core as the relationship or outer circumstances grow more and more intimate. In this state, achieving a balance between inner self and outer circumstances can result in balance.

What is balance in this case? Simple, really. The idea that who you are and what drives you manifests in what you do and how you present yourself in the world. When there is a mismatch, getting through bumpy times becomes exponentially more difficult. When there is synchronicity, however, one’s ability to face down challenges and power through to the other side becomes effortless. Okay, perhaps effortless is an overstatement, because life can get tough and challenges can seem insurmountable, but when you know you’re on the right path, there’s an inner resource that fuels you through. At least that’s been my experience.

When I consider the journey that brought me to today, I see so clearly in the 20/20 hindsight view that when the inner layers are based on old fixed ideas of self, or the outer goals towards which one goes are based on an inaccurate map to the inner self, achieving that synchronicity isn’t just hard, but damn near impossible. One may be able (as I was) to stay engaged and do something passionately for which one doesn’t really have true inner passion, but over time the ability to do so becomes more and more difficult. When challenges arise, slogging through them wears patience and the soul thin. There are plenty of people in the world who continue that slog, perhaps because they’ve never been given the opportunity to really consider what true congruity might look like. Perhaps because they never had the luxury of time or opportunity to even consider what might drive their passions more fully.

As I sit in the newly renovated office of my business pulling the words from a notebook onto the keyboard, feeling deeply connected to myself and to the world in which I’m living, I realize just how truly blessed I am … and it’s a blessing that everyone can enjoy.

Certainly there’s a need to provide for oneself and one’s family and it may not be possible that your daily work be the immediate connection to your passion. That doesn’t mean that you cannot find a way to bring your passion and your inner self into the world outside.

The journey can begin today … start it.